A cycle that contains finitely many elements is a finite cycle and the cycle length is the number of elements it contains.
Let 
be a permutation written as a finite product of disjoint
cycles of finite length. The order of is the least common
multiple of the lengths of the cycles.
A transposition is a cycle of length two. Clearly a transposition has order two, but there are permutations of order two that are not transpositions.
One important application of transpositions is that every permutation may be written as a product of transpositions (although not necessarily disjoint and not uniquely). A permutation is an even permutation if it is a product of an even number of transpositions and an odd permutation if it is a product of an odd number of transpositions.
As the definition suggests, a permutation cannot be both odd and even.
However, the decomposition into a product of transpositions is not unique
nor is the number of transpositions unique. For example, the permutation
may be written as 
, or
.
Of course, the identity permutation is an even permutation.